Marketing & GrowthFree
Email List Health and Deliverability Audit
Find out why your emails stopped reaching inboxes, which groups of addresses cause it, and what removing each group costs before you delete anyone.
Paste or attach whatever your email platform exports: sends, bounces, spam complaints, unsubscribes, clicks and sales by campaign, or a contact list with activity dates. River works out why your mail is landing in spam or not arriving, and which groups of addresses are causing it. Each group gets a clear call: keep mailing, ask them to confirm they still want your email, wind them down over the next few sends, or stop now. Every call comes with what it costs in list size and revenue.
Most list cleaning advice says the same thing: sort by last open, draw a line at ninety days and delete everything below it. Opens are an unreliable signal now, because some mail apps open every message automatically and others block the tracking entirely. Gmail itself says it does not track open rates. This audit sorts on what inbox providers do watch, such as bounces and spam complaints, and on actions only a person takes, like clicks and purchases. It also puts a price on each cut, so somebody can approve it.
It is for ecommerce and newsletter teams watching delivery slip, small businesses that got a warning from Gmail, and anyone who inherited a list with an old import nobody can explain. If your campaign results live in several reports, the email performance report pulls them together first. If the problem might be your automated receipts and alerts rather than your newsletters, run the transactional email audit on the messages sent from the same domain.
What inbox providers actually measure
Gmail publishes the number it acts on. Its sender guidelines ask every sender to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and never reach 0.30%. The same page says Google does not track open rates and that low opens are not necessarily a sign of a delivery problem. So the metric most cleanup rules use is one Gmail never sees, and the one it does use, complaints, is often missing from the cleanup plan entirely.
Take an illustrative shop with 128,000 addresses and a complaint rate that crept from 0.06% to 0.14%. Sorting by opens would remove about a third of the list, including loyal buyers whose mail app hides opens. Sorting by source tells a different story. A 2023 partner import of 14,000 addresses, about 11% of the list, produced most of the complaints and almost no sales. Stopping mail to that group alone fixes the problem at a fraction of the cost.
The unsubscribe path matters too, because a hard-to-find unsubscribe turns into a spam complaint. Gmail requires bulk senders to support one-click unsubscribe, which works through hidden settings in each email that your platform should add. In the United States, the CAN-SPAM rule says opting out cannot require more than visiting a single web page or giving anything beyond an email address. A preference page that asks people to log in first fails that test. The email preference centre template builds one from your own unsubscribe reasons.
How it works
Bring the send history
Paste or attach your platform's campaign report or contact export, in whatever format it comes.
River groups the addresses
It sorts addresses by source, bounces, complaints and real activity instead of by opens.
See the cost
Each group comes with the list size and revenue you lose by not mailing it.
Plan the next sends
Ask in chat for the reconfirmation email or a schedule built around your next campaigns.
What you get
- Every group of addresses sized, with its share of spam complaints and permanent bounces
- A keep, reconfirm, wind down or stop call for each group, with the reason in plain words
- The list size and revenue each removal costs, worked out before anyone approves it
- Bounces sorted by type, so a full mailbox is never treated as a dead address
- A dated wind-down schedule across your next few sends instead of one big deletion
- A checklist for your unsubscribe setup, with what to look for in your platform
Common questions
Why are my emails suddenly going to spam?
Usually because more recipients are marking them as spam, or because you are mailing addresses that no longer exist. Both tell inbox providers your list is not wanted. Common causes are an old or bought list, a sudden jump in sending volume, and an unsubscribe link that is hard to find. The audit shows which of these is happening in your own numbers.
We only have opens, not clicks per contact. Can this still work?
Yes, with less precision, and the report says so plainly. Bounces, spam complaints, where each address came from and how long ago it signed up carry most of the work. Where clicks are missing, any conclusion based on opens is marked as provisional, and exporting click data is listed as the most useful fix for next time.
How much of my list will I have to remove?
Whatever your numbers support, and often less than a ninety-day open rule would suggest. Problems tend to concentrate in a few groups, such as one old import or addresses that keep bouncing. The report shows each group's size and revenue next to its call, so you can decide how far to go with the cost in front of you.
Will removing addresses cost us sales?
You will know before you decide, because the revenue each group produced is shown next to every call. Groups that have not clicked or bought in a long time and generate complaints rarely carry meaningful sales. Where a group does still buy, the plan suggests reconfirming them rather than cutting them, so you keep the customers who want your email.
What is the difference between a hard and soft bounce?
A hard bounce means the address does not exist or will never accept mail, so stop sending to it. A soft bounce is temporary, such as a full mailbox or a server that asked to try later. An address that soft bounces for a few days is not dead. Treating soft bounces as permanent throws away real customers.
Do I need Google Postmaster Tools set up first?
No, but it helps. Postmaster Tools is a free Google service that shows the spam complaint rate Gmail measures for your domain, which is the number with a published limit. If you do not have it, the report puts setting it up near the top of the list, because otherwise you are guessing at the figure that matters most.
Sources
Built by
Chandler Supple
Co-founder & CEO, River
Chandler has spent the last six years working in AI, building tools for millions of users and Fortune 100 companies. In 2025, he co-founded River to build a new kind of operating system for AI agents.
Email List Health and Deliverability Audit
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